Even
though an incorrect decision may be the so-called “law of the case”
as to the parties actually before the Supreme Court in a particular instance
(and unchallengeable by them because no means of appeal is available),
it can never constitute infallible legal dogma as to everyone else in
all future instances. After all, Article VI, Clause 2 of the Constitution
provides that “[t]his Constitution, and the Laws of the United States
which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which
shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the
supreme Law of the Land”—with no mention of decisions of the
Supreme Court (or any other judicial tribunal) as being included within
“the supreme Law”. Obviously, no such decision can ever qualify
as “[t]his Constitution”, one of “the Laws of the United
States”, or a “Treat[y] made * * * under the Authority of
the United States”. For the Supreme Court itself is a mere creature
of and subordinate to “[t]his Constitution”, not its creator
or its superior. See U.S. Const. art. III, § 1. The Court’s
decisions are not “Laws of the United States”, because “[a]ll
legislative Powers * * * granted [by the Constitution] shall be vested
in a Congress of the United States”, not in any judicial tribunal.
See U.S. Const. art, I, § 1. And all “Treaties” derive
exclusively from the President’s “Power, by and with the Advice
and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the
Senators present concur”, not from any part of the “[t]he
Judicial Power of the United States * * * vested in [the] supreme Court”.
Contrast U.S. Const. art. II, § 2, cl. 2 with art.
III, § 1.

So far,
this commentary has focused on Mrs. Clinton’s catalogue of alleged
misbehavior, because her shady affairs have received an overwhelming amount
of perfervid attention in the domestic and even international media. Yet,
in the long run, Mr. Trump must deal with several even more pressing concerns
if America is to accept his “Oath or Affirmation” as genuine:

First,
on various occasions he has demonstrated a willingness to question what
actually happened on 9/11. This indicates his suspicion—which every
thinking American shares—that the real culprits have not yet been
identified, or if identified not yet brought to justice. See,
e.g., Kevin Robert Ryan, Another Nineteen: Investigating Legitimate
9/11 Suspects (Microbloom, 2013). In light of the horrendous harms
to persons and property perpetrated on 9/11—and especially the consequences
of those crimes with respect to the elaboration of a national para-military
police-state apparatus in this country, the systematic curtailment of
Americans’ basic civil liberties, and the launching of highly questionable
military adventures overseas during the Bush Administration and Mr. Obama’s
residence in the White House, all in patent defiance of the Constitution—a
refusal by Mr. Trump to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”
through an honest and thoroughgoing investigation of the 9/11 Event would
provide compelling evidence that he never intended to “take the
* * * Oath or Affirmation” of the President truthfully as to that
matter, either.

Second,
prior to his inauguration Mr. Trump put himself on record as promising
that, in his Administration, “[w]e [namely, the government of the
United States] will stop looking to topple regimes and overthrow governments”.
See [Link]
(01 December 2016). This evidenced his belief—again, in which every
thinking American along with the rest of the civilized world concurs—that
rogue officials within the Bush Administration and among Mr. Obama’s
entourage have engaged in such willful, wanton, and reckless
aggression on more than one occasion. Again, in patent defiance of
the Constitution, as everyone knows or ought to know that “the
genius and character of our institutions are peaceful, and the power to
declare war was not conferred upon Congress”—or anyone else—“for
purposes of aggression or aggrandizement”. Fleming v. Page,
50 U.S. (9 Howard) 603, 614 (1850). In addition, everyone conversant with
these matters knows that the CIA and the Pentagon should be the first
rocks Mr. Trump ought to turn over in a search for the chief culprits.
So if Mr. Trump now refuses to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully
executed” by allowing the miscreants who have been involved in “toppl[ing]
regimes and overthrow[ing] governments” to escape justice, it would
hardly be amiss to conclude that he never intended to “take the
* * * Oath or Affirmation” of the President truthfully as to that
matter, as well.

Moreover,
Mr. Trump’s failure to take appropriate action as to this particular
would demonstrate such imprudence as to draw into question, not only his
personal capability (as opposed to his legal eligibility) to serve, but
also his likelihood to survive, as President. For, rather than risk
the frustration of their complots, the rogue officials who have engaged
in “toppl[ing foreign] regimes and overthrow[ing foreign]
governments” in the past and who undoubtedly intend to persevere
in like endeavors in the future would hardly shrink from “toppl[ing]”
and “overthrow[ing]” the Trump Administration—if
not in the dramatic fashion their predecessors cut short President Kennedy’s
tenure then in some other, but no less effective, manner—if Mr.
Trump refused to give them the criminal leeway they desired. See,
e.g., JFK and the Unspeakable. Why He Died and Why It Matters (Maryknoll,
New York: Orbis Books, 2008; reprinted, New York, New York: Touchstone,
2010).

Indeed,
they have already set out on this nefarious course, by floating in the
media the fantastic assertions that “Russian hacking” exerted
a decisive improper influence in favor of Mr. Trump’s election,
that Mr. Trump himself is subject to blackmail by Russia, and that he
is even a “dupe” or “useful idiot” working (albeit
perhaps unconsciously) in Russia’s interests—by means of those
canards casting a pall over the legitimacy of his Administration at its
very inception. Although some observers fear that these and like tar brushes
may have painted Mr. Trump into a corner, in reality they have provided
him with an uniquely propitious opportunity to sweep out the responsible
agencies with an iron broom. For if such charges are actually nothing
more than “old grey mares”—that is, false narratives
concocted by rogue operatives in “the intelligence community”—then
the officials responsible for propagating them are arguably engaged in
an attempt to overthrow the legitimate government of the United States
through a coup d’état to be waged by Mr. Trump’s
enemies in Congress and the bureaucracy, in the ever-hostile “mainstream
media”, and in a gaggle of subversive NGOs intent upon applying
within the United States their extensive experience in rigging “régime
change” in various foreign countries. Inasmuch as the plotters of
this coup must be aware that it could never be brought to completion
absent the application of force at some stage (for instance, through the
fomentation of violent civil disturbances on a massive scale), and
therefore must already have included such operations in their plans,
they have exposed themselves to serious charges. See 18 U.S.C. §
2384. Mr. Trump certainly enjoys both the authority and the ability to
turn the tables on these conspirators. See 10 U.S.C. §§
332 and 333. But whether he can muster the gumption to do so remains to
be seen.

Third,
prior to his election, Mr. Trump expressed skepticism—also embraced
by millions of Americans whose heads are not buried in the sand—as
to whether Barack Obama was ever actually “eligible to the Office
of President” as “a natural born Citizen”. See U.S.
Const. art. II, § 1, cl. 4. Mr. Trump knew or should have known then,
and knows or should know now, that inter alia:

(i)
No report of an official, full-scale inquiry into Mr. Obama’s purported
eligibility has ever been made public (or perhaps even conducted behind
closed doors)—whether by Congress when it had the opportunities
to do so, as I first explained in my NewsWithViews commentary “In
the Shadow of Nemesis” (8 December 2008); or by law-enforcement
agencies such as the FBI; or by the courts of either the United States
or any State.

(ii)
Mr. Obama’s parentage and the place of his birth, and their effects
on his citizenship, continue to be the subjects of controversy.

(iii)
The provenance and authenticity of Mr. Obama’s “birth certificate”
(or whatever name should be attached to the document his minions caused
to be publicized with his apparent approval) have been impugned through
the research commissioned by former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, without
adequate rebuttal from Mr. Obama’s camp.

(iv)
Mr. Obama’s status as a citizen of Indonesia, resulting from his
mother’s reported second marriage to an Indonesian and his subsequent
translation to and sojourn in that land as a child, is still opaque.

(v)
Whether, upon his return to the United States from Indonesia, Mr. Obama
took the steps required at the time to reassert or to secure American
citizenship has yet to be established in any public forum.

(vi)
Whether, during Mr. Obama’s years in colleges and law school in
this country, he claimed benefits or otherwise identified himself as a
“foreign” student remains undetermined, because he has refused
to release the relevant records.

(vii)
Challenges have been leveled against the authenticity of both Mr. Obama’s
purported registration with the Selective Service and his supposed Social
Security card. And

(viii)
Widely publicized statements emanating from Mr. Obama himself, from Michelle
Obama, and from certain of Mr. Obama’s relatives over the years
have cast doubts upon his citizenship.

The
necessity for Mr. Trump to pry open this can of worms cannot be overstated—

(a)
Although America has finally awakened from the long national nightmare
of Mr. Obama’s residence in the White House, his “legacy”
will continue to fester. If unmasked as ineligible for the office he pretended
to hold, however, every measure he inflicted on this country while impersonating
“the President” could and should be set aside as void ab
initio. This would not unavoidably result in an hopelessly chaotic
situation, if (for example) in good time and in a systematic fashion certain
of the “Bills which shall have passed the House of Representatives
and the Senate” during the period of Mr. Obama’s imposture
Congress saw fit to “be presented [anew] to [Mr. Trump as] the [real]
President of the United States” for him to “sign” or
to “return * * * with his Objections”. See U.S. Const.
art. I, § 7, cl. 2. Also, equivalent corrective steps could be taken
to deal with those of Mr. Obama’s purported “executive”
actions which Mr. Trump did not desire to adopt anew under his own authority;
as well as with many judicial decisions predicated upon Mr. Obama’s
unconstitutional handiwork, through (say) the Trump Administration’s
invocation of the doctrine of Hazel-Atlas Glass Company v. Hartford-Empire
Company, 322 U.S. 238 (1944). And if these measures did raise problems
both complex and costly to resolve, the blame would not lie on Mr. Trump,
but instead on the parties in official positions who refused to address
the question of Mr. Obama’s ineligibility when it first arose.

(b)
Exposure of Mr. Obama’s imposture (if such it was) would strike
a crippling blow at the neo-Bolshevik “color revolution” now
being organized by the Marxist intelligentsia in the suites of NGOs funded
by renegade billionaires for the purpose of defaming, frustrating, sabotaging,
and finally demolishing the Trump Administration. Deprived of Mr. Obama
as its figurehead, neo-Bolshevism in this country would collapse
in the confusion of internal struggles for power which would render it
an impotent political force for years to come, if not destroy it altogether.
Most important,

(c)
Proof of Mr. Obama’s ineligibility would preserve the United States
from the “precedent” of once having acquiesced in an usurper’s
seizure of the White House. To be sure, purported “precedents”
which violate the Constitution de facto do not change the Constitution
de jure. For the Constitution of the United States is not cut
from the same ill-woven cloth as the “constitution” of England,
which throughout history has been altered by one successful “precedent”
after another (even though many of them were patent usurpations). Nonetheless,
it is one thing to suffer a thoroughly corrupt political figure (such
as Mrs. Clinton is alleged to be) to escape prosecution—for that
does not set a “precedent” which can immunize all such individuals
in the future. It is one thing to cover up a “false flag”
operation in which rogue officials in some “intelligence agencies”
have participated (such as many Americans believe the 9/11 Event to have
been)—for that, too, does not set a “precedent” which
can exonerate all such miscreants in years to come. And it is even only
one thing to countenance wars of aggression fomented by renegades within
America’s “military-industrial complex” and “national-security”
apparatus (such as this country’s on-going military adventures in
the Middle East)—for that does not set a “precedent”
capable of overruling the fundamental principle of the Nuremberg Tribunal.
See Office of United States Chief of Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality,
Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression (Washington, D.C.: United States
Government Printing Office, 1946), Volume 1, Article 6, at 5. But usurpation
of “the Office of President” for eight years by someone not
eligible for that office in the first place, while almost everyone else
in public life looked the other way and worked hand-in-glove with the
usurper, is another thing altogether.

For
if that is taken as an effectively binding “precedent”
because it remains uncorrected when the evidence cries out for its correction,
then Article II, Section 1, Clause 4 of the Constitution becomes a dead
letter. And with it the Constitution as a whole—because, his tenure
in the White House being utterly lawless in its inception, a faux
“President” labors under no duty to, and surely will not,
“take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”, the Constitution
first and foremost among them.

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In sum,
as President Mr. Trump is not free simply to ignore these matters, if
“the Deplorables” (and all other sensible Americans, for that
matter) are to take his “Oath or Affirmation” seriously. Should
he fail in this regard, then rather than becoming “great again”
this country will soon find that its condition warrants the lugubrious
prognosis put forward as a general rule of civilizational devolution by
Oswald Spengler in his study Der Untergang des Abendlandes. Although
this title is usually translated as The Decline of the West,
the German noun Untergang can also be rendered, more ominously, as “downfall”,
“ruin”, or “destruction”—which in this country’s
case will be a fitting epitaph.

Edwin Vieira, Jr., holds four
degrees from Harvard: A.B. (Harvard College), A.M. and Ph.D. (Harvard
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences), and J.D. (Harvard Law School).

For more than thirty years he
has practiced law, with emphasis on constitutional issues. In the Supreme
Court of the United States he successfully argued or briefed the cases
leading to the landmark decisions Abood v. Detroit Board of Education,
Chicago Teachers Union v. Hudson, and Communications Workers of America
v. Beck, which established constitutional and statutory limitations
on the uses to which labor unions, in both the private and the public
sectors, may apply fees extracted from nonunion workers as a condition
of their employment.

He has written numerous monographs
and articles in scholarly journals, and lectured throughout the county.
His most recent work on money and banking is the two-volume Pieces
of Eight: The Monetary Powers and Disabilities of the United States
Constitution (2002), the most comprehensive study in existence of American
monetary law and history viewed from a constitutional perspective. www.piecesofeight.us

He is also the co-author (under
a nom de plume) of the political novel CRA$HMAKER:
A Federal Affaire (2000), a not-so-fictional story of an engineered
crash of the Federal Reserve System, and the political upheaval it causes.
www.crashmaker.com

Even
though an incorrect decision may be the so-called “law of the case”
as to the parties actually before the Supreme Court in a particular instance
(and unchallengeable by them because no means of appeal is available),
it can never constitute infallible legal dogma as to everyone else in
all future instances.